Tolbert was a miser in early days when men kept their money about them. It is said that he would never kill a maverick no matter how hungry he was but would always brand it. He never bought sugar or molasses; bacon was a rare luxury; he and his men lived principally on jerked venison and javelin meat. When he “worked” and had an outfit to feed, he always told the cocinero to cook the bread early so that it would be cold and hard before the hands got to it. When he died none of his money could be found. So, even till this day, people dig for it around the old ranch house. One man who was working on the place some fifteen years ago saw two men in a wagon go down a ravine that runs near the ranch. He thought that they were hunters; but when the strangers passed him on their way out the next morning, he noted that one of them had a shotgun across his knees. When the ranch hand rode down into the ravine a few days later, he found that the wagon tracks led from a fresh hole under a live oak tree and that near the hole were pieces of old steel hinges that looked as if they had been cut off with a cold chisel. However, not many people think that the two strangers got Tolbert’s money.
Berry got that, and he never hunted for it either. He had moved on to the ranch when he bought it and a number of years had passed. One day when he had nothing else for his Mexican to do, he told him to put some new posts in the old corral fence, [[42]]which was made of pickets that were rotting down. The Mexican worked along digging post holes and putting in new posts until about ten o’clock. Then at about the third post from the south gate he struck something so hard that it turned the edge of his spade. He was used to digging post holes with a crowbar and a tin can, and so he went to a mesquite tree where the tools were kept and got the crowbar.
But the crowbar would no more dig into the hard substance than the spade would. The sun was mighty hot, anyhow; so the Mexican went up to the house where el señor Berry was whittling sticks on his gallery, and told him that he couldn’t dig any more, that at the third post hole from the south gate it looked as if the devil himself had humped up into a rock that nothing could get through. Berry snorted around considerably at first, but directly he seemed to think of something and told his man, very well, not to dig any more but to saddle up and go out and bring in the main remuda. Now, only the day before they had had the main remuda in the pen and had caught out fresh mounts to keep in the little horse pasture. By this time the other horses would be scattered clear away on the back side of the pasture. The Mexican wondered what the patrón wanted the remuda for again. But it was none of his business. Well, the ride would take him all the rest of the day, and at least he would not have to dig any more post holes before mañana.
After the Mexican had saddled his horse and drunk a cafecita for lunch and fooled away half an hour putting in new stirrup leather strings and finally got out of sight, Berry slouched down to the pens. He came back to his shade on the gallery and whittled for an hour or two longer until everything around the jacal, even the Mexican’s wife, was taking a siesta. Then he pulled off his spurs, which always dragged with a big clink when he walked, and went down to the pen again. The spade and the crowbar were where the Mexican had let them fall. Berry punched the crowbar down into the half-made hole. It almost bounced out of his hand, and he heard a kind of metallic thud. No, it was not flint-rock that had stopped the digging.
Berry went around back of the water trough to the huisache where his horse was tied and led him into the pen. Then he started to work. He began digging two or three feet out to one side of the hole. The dry ground was packed from the tramp of thousands of cattle and horses. He had to use the crowbar to [[43]]loosen the soil. But it was no great task to get out a patch of earth two or three feet square and eighteen or twenty inches deep. Berry knew what he was about, and as he scraped the loosened earth out with his spade he could feel a flat metal surface that seemed to have rivets in it. It was the lid of a chest, and when he had uncovered it, Berry drew up one of the firm, new posts to use as a fulcrum for the crowbar. With that he levered up the end of the chest. As he suspected, it was too heavy and too tightly wedged for him to lift out. He kicked a chunk under the raised edge and then looped a stout rope about the exposed end. He had dragged cows out of the bog on his horse, and he knew that the chest was not so heavy as a cow. He had but fifty yards to drag it, and that down grade, before he was in the brush, where he could prize the lid off.
When the Mexican got back that night his mujer told him that Señor Berry had gone to San Antonio in the buckboard, and that he had left word for the remuda to be turned back into the big pasture and for the repair of the corrals to be continued. “They say” that the deposit that Berry made at the Frost National Bank was a clean $17,000, nearly all in silver.
[1] Santa Anna, according to Brown, did cross into Texas at Laredo, but he went to San Antonio, not Goliad. See Brown, John Henry, History of Texas, Vol. I, p. 569 ff. Another Santa Anna chest is said to have been dropped off near Lockhart on the road to Nacogdoches. Of course, Santa Anna never went from San Antonio to Nacogdoches. [↑]
[2] This latter explanation is more probable. The feminine Santa is never apocopated in Spanish, and caja is feminine. [↑]
[3] A tale common to both legend and roguery. I have a copy of a letter written in 1911 by a prisoner in Madrid to an American at Aguas Calientes, Mexico, in which the prisoner offered to share $273,000 concealed on the American’s land, provided the American would send funds for passage of the prisoner and his wife. [↑]